There is general acceptance that treatment of cancer using surgery with or without radiotherapy remains the first treatment modality for most cancer protocols. Radiotherapy is used quite successfully for many forms of cancer while chemotherapy has become an integral part of a multi-disciplinary treatment of cancers and has served also as a palliative measure in cases of advanced cancer.
Despite advances in the early detection of tumors and in the use of surgery, radiation and chemical therapies for disease management, the worldwide mortality from human cancer remains unacceptably high and has increased in the last few years. In the United States from 1930 through 2004, a trend of increasing cancer deaths is shown among both men and women. Although advances in the early detection of tumors and in the use of chemotherapy and surgery for disease management have helped to enhance the overall survival of afflicted patients, major improvements in treatments for most human cancers are urgently needed.
The control and therapy of cancer may benefit from introduction of new treatments derived from natural products. Many pharmaceutical products approved for human disease treatment are derived from natural sources. The discovery of efficacious compounds for cancer management will benefit from new understandings of molecular and cellular pathways that regulate tumor proliferation and progression.
Patients are becoming acutely aware of the alternative approaches. Nine studies performed worldwide among cancer patients showed that 41.2% used complementary and alternative medicine during their treatment.
In almost all cases of treatment failure, the patient develops distant metastases. While surgery, radiotherapy and chemotherapy are all available to eradicate loco-regional disease, they are of little value with distant metastases. For such distant metastases, chemotherapy is the recommended approach, but effectiveness is limited by toxic side-effects at high doses and lack of specificity. Furthermore, within the holistic approach of clinical cancer therapy there is now increasing emphasis being given to patient quality of life following these classical treatments, which is encompassed in the term “hospice.” The conclusion is survival should not be the sole criterion for assessing the treatment results. Thus, it has increasingly become an accepted practice for the oncologist to provide a way to make the patient “comfortable” during treatment.
It is also well-recognized that both radiotherapy and chemotherapy invariably damage or weaken the patient's immunological defenses which may have already been damaged by the cancer itself. From these observations there has now developed a new awareness in cancer therapy concerning the importance of the patient's immune system. Biological Response Modifiers (BRMs) have now evolved as the fourth method of cancer treatment in addition to surgery, radiotherapy and chemotherapy. Such treatments with BRMs are considered more biological than directly cytotoxic.
In the present disclosure, formulations are provided which are based on numerous references to key ingredients derived from natural sources in chemically pure form that have direct and safe efficacies in the treatment of cancer. The formulation can be considered a supplement to the current cancer treatment methods. However, the importance of the components of the formulation, such as antioxidants, antiangiogenic compounds, natural killer cell and other immune stimulators and direct cancer cytotoxicity, should be considered as a possible first line of treatment and prevention of cancer in the near future.